But I had my eyes closed. I thought I’d keep them that way for a little longer. I thought it something I ought to do.

I did it. I closed them just like he said. ‘Are they closed?’ he said. ‘Don’t fudge.’

I didn’t answer her.

He found my hand, the hand with the pen. He closed his hand over my hand. ‘Go ahead, bub, draw,’ he said. ‘Draw. You’ll see. I’ll follow along with you. It’ll be okay. Just begin now like I’m telling you. You’ll see. Draw,’ the blind man said.

I said, ‘The truth is, cathedrals don’t mean anything special to me. Nothing. Cathedrals. They’re something to look at on late-night TV. That’s all they are.’

‘That’s all right,’ I said. Then I said, ‘I’m glad for the company.’

Not much it doesn’t, bub,’

He said, ‘I do now, my dear. There’s a first time for everything. But I don’t feel anything yet.’

I thought she might have gone to bed. I wished she’d come back downstairs. I didn’t want to be left alone with a blind man.

I waited in vain to hear my name on my wife’s sweet lips: ‘And then my dear husband came into my life’ – something like that. But I heard nothing of the sort. More talk of Robert.

The blind man had right away located his foods, he knew just where everything was on his plate. I watched him with admiration as he used his knife and fork on the meat.

I remembered having read somewhere that the blind didn’t smoke because, as speculation had it, they couldn’t see the smoke they exhaled.

I’d always thought dark glasses were a must for the blind. Fact was, I wished he had a pair. At first glance, his eyes looked like anyone else’s eyes. But if you looked close, there was something different about them.

Did you have a good train ride?’ I said. ‘Which side of the train did you sit on, by the way?’

he was wearing a full beard! A beard on a blind man!

I saw my wife laughing as she packed the car. I saw her get out of the car and shut the door. She was still wearing a smile. Just amazing.

Imagine a woman who could never see herself as she was seen in the eyes of her loved one. A woman who could go on day after day and never receive the smallest compliment from her beloved. A woman whose husband could never read the expression on her face, be it misery or something better.

That’s a name for a coloured woman.

I don’t have any friends,’ she said. ‘Period. Besides,’ she said, ‘goddamn it, his wife’s just died! Don’t you understand that? The man’s lost his wife!’

Her officer – Why should he have a name? He was the childhood sweetheart, and what more does he want?

She told me. And she told me something else. On her last day in the office, the blind man asked if he could touch her face. She agreed to this. she told me he touched his fingers to every part of her face, her nose – even her neck!

In the movies, the blind moved slowly and never laughed.

He was no one I knew. And his being blind bothered me

This blind man, an old friend of my wife’s, he was on his way to spend the night.

SAG⇄E

by staying involved

Which part of the SAG⇄E framework focuses on what went well in your work?

Think about how you can develop over time. Growth is about turning feedback into action — using what you've learned to improve your skills and performance in future tasks.

Focus on what went well.

Select each

your professional role

comments

gave each other feedback

how you can stay involved in the process

Feedback literacy means having the ability to understand feedback, make sense of what it's telling you, and know how to use it to improve your work.

reflection

a paper

an assignment

SAG⇄E Framework

types of feedback

Types

Supporting Files

Supporting Files

Mitral Valve Regurgitation

Explain how effective teamwork enhances learning and capability development

.

not as a “group assignment requirement,” but

eamwork vs Group Work

ncluding SAG⇄E)

.

ell; this modu

Question 1: Prompt: Which strategy would help you manage negotiation moments more effectively?

Negotiation & Conflict Resolution

Use these example phrases

Collaboration Boundary Plan

Giving and Receiving Peer Feedback

This module helps you recognise what ethical collaboration looks like — and how to avoid collusion.

Concept Explainer

Concept Explainer

yourself in team

Los retos educativos están planteados con base en los requerimientos que la dinámica social sugiere, con el propósito de que la participación de los ciudadanos sea coherente y pertinente.

Fundamentos

Generation

Augmented

Retrieval

grounded

Finite context — they can’t ingest entire corpora at once.

Static knowledge — their training data is frozen at a point in time.

Embeddings: Wrapper around a text embedding model, used for converting text to embeddings.

We can embed and store all of our document splits in a single command

Define complex inputs with Pydantic models or JSON schemas:

Chat models accept a sequence of message objects as input and return an AIMessage as output. Interactions are often stateless, so that a simple conversational loop involves invoking a model with a growing list of messages.

Message prompts

Messages are the fundamental unit of context for models in LangChain. They represent the input and output of models, carrying both the content and metadata needed to represent the state of a conversation when interacting with an LLM.

When using a model separately from an agent, it is up to you to execute the requested tool and return the result back to the model for use in subsequent reasoning.

The easiest way to get started with a standalone model in LangChain is to use init_chat_model to initialize one from a chat model provider of your choice

Agents follow the ReAct (“Reasoning + Acting”) pattern

Tools give agents the ability to take actions. Agents go beyond simple model-only tool binding by facilitating: Multiple tool calls in sequence (triggered by a single prompt) Parallel tool calls when appropriate Dynamic tool selection based on previous results Tool retry logic and error handling State persistence across tool calls

An LLM Agent runs tools in a loop to achieve a goal. An agent runs until a stop condition is met - i.e., when the model emits a final output or an iteration limit is reached.

2: Identities discusses identity as socially constructed and embedded in a system of power and resistance. It outlines important identity labels and when and why they emerged.

El costo de los retrocesos

So You Want To Speak At Software Conferences?

Jak pokonać problemy ze snem i ocalić zdrowie? Mateusz Majchrzak [Expert w Bentleyu]

undeniably

eligible

derivative

Consensus

sophisticated

affairs

context

plot

dilemma

moral

Ethical (adjective)

Regulate

Coherent

Koniec bezpiecznego B2B? Algorytm ZUS wytypuje "fikcyjnych" przedsiębiorców

Storm Events Database contains the records used to create the official NOAA Storm Data publication, documenting

We continue to lose ground, in part because rather than defend us, concerned individuals and groups are trying to take over from us (spurred in no small part by the odious Brewster Kahle of the odious-but-presently-necessary Internet Archive)

AI.” There have been at least two this year. The Loon will have more to say about this anon.

reap

engaging

competencies

This research encompasses a thorough examination of 5595 confirmed exoplanets listed in the Archive as of 10 March 2024, systematically evaluated according to their calculated average surface temperatures and stellar classifications of their host stars, taking into account the biases implicit in the methodologies used for their discovery. Machine learning, in the form of a Random Forest classifier and an XGBoost classifier, is applied in the classification with high accuracies. The feature importance analysis indicates that our approach captures the most important parameters for habitability classification.

in their absence, nothing else matters

______

Generate MACCS keys from SMILES.

Now we want to get structure information of the compounds from PubChem (in isomeric SMILES). In [27]:

Payment for projects to be implemented in Fall 2025 will be disbursed in late Spring 2025.Payment for projects to be implemented in Spring 2026 - Fall 2026 will be disbursed at the start of the 2026 year.

Spring 2025

Monday, March 3, 2025, at 11:59pm

Spring 2025.

Fall 2026

Monday, March 3, 2025 at 11:59pm, will be considered.

Fall 2025 and Fall 2026 (i.e., Fall 2025, Spring 2026, Summer 2026, Fall 2026).

All GW faculty are eligible to apply.

$1,400 or more per student per year.

Applications are closed for 2025. If you would like to find out more about LAI's support for OER, please contact open@gwu.edu.

it writes like the millions of us who were pushed through a very particular educational and societal pipeline, a pipeline deliberately designed to sandpaper away ambiguity, and forge our thoughts into a very specific, very formal, and very impressive shape

For example, many “podcasts” have chosen to partner directly with streaming services rather than provide an open RSS feed. Whether these should even be called podcasts is in doubt; what’s not is that they’ve allowed those streaming services to intermediate their audiences.

Natural World Heritage Site Walk through a sea of white sand dunes stretching to the horizon

I describe thevaried analyses and stakes of settler colonialism as well as indigenous, postcolonial, and decolonial thought.

“botanical sublime.”

Feminist economists powerfullydemonstrate how caring labor has been long been relegated to unpaid work and the private domestic sphere—eveninside academia. Histories of care work remain deeply feminized and racialized. Indigenous, disability, and queerrights activists remind us that caring for each other and the planet is critical for life and for social and planetaryjustice. 

Planttaxonomy provided that colonizers sought to organize the natural world. In systemizing the world intocategories and an evolutionary tree for life on earth, plant taxonomy is a critical node of colonial botany and itsenduring afterlives. Plant reproductive biology chronicles how the imaginaries of gender and race under colonialsexuality were imposed on plants. Reproduction, central to theories of Darwinian evolution, is the bedrock ofmodern biology. Finally, understanding plant biogeography through invasion biology centers questions of space andtime. Do organisms in a particular place and time? What work do concepts such as native and foreign do?

At its core, the book advocates for the critical need for work across academic disciplines. The sciences needhumanistic inquiry, and the humanities need the sciences. The future of the planet depends on it. For biologists, thisbook historicizes the field, making a familiar world unfamiliar. For social scientists and humanists, it introducesbotanical worlds in a new idiom, making unfamiliar worlds more familiar. An interdisciplinary approach is criticalfor the problems we face. The natural world and its myriad environmental crises cannot be adequately understood bythe tools of botany alone. In opening up the worlds of botany and feminism through interdisciplinary approaches, wesee new multispecies possibilities

In disrupting this story by bringing898feminism and botany together, we see how botany remains grounded in the violence of its colonial pasts.Collaborations between feminist, indigenous, and biological thought can help us work toward more just planetaryfutures.

Rather thanfixate on an “ideal” or “right” nature, queer and trans ecologies stress multiplicity and opening up space forgenderqueer and nonconformist bodies in many senses of the word (human, animal, plant, land, water). Similarly,links between disabled ecologies and environmental devastation allow us to see how key concepts from disabilitystudies—loss and limitation, vulnerability, interdependence, and adaptation—might offer key lessons for accessiblefutures for myriad disabled beings and impaired landscapes.

Both queer time and crip time remind us of how expectations of the normal link to experiences of time and space,and why challenging normative ideas in describing plant worlds is productive. After all, plants are forever forcedinto human time for science and commerce—botany, agriculture, horticulture, and plant biotechnologies. As plantlovers and passionate interlocutors with plant worlds, we must reckon with this history.

Like crip time, queer time captures how queer people have had to contend with a world where heterosexual (andcis-bodied) expectations of marriage, children, and family were, and are, closed to many.

To think, read, or act queerly is to think across boundaries, beyond the normal and the normative; toexplore the spaces deemed marginal, vulnerable, precarious, and perverse

hallenging heterosexuality and reproductive(hetero)normativity, queer studies emphasizes the necessity of thinking about sexuality not in terms of bodies oridentity but as a field of power

The most violent and misarticulated impact of colonization is what Sumana Roy refers to as the“substitution of forest-time by this imported industrial idea of time.” The term from disability studies 
!captures how disabled, chronically ill, or neurodivergent people experience time (and space) very differently thanable-bodied/minded people. There is a difference between crip time and “normate” time. Crip time captures disabled peoples’ different experiences of time in the world.

Crip theory eloquently captures ableism with the term . As Eli Clare writes, the supercrip is one of the"dominant images of disabled people. We are taught to celebrate the boy without hands who bats well, or a blind manwho hikes the Appalachian Trail, or an adolescent girl with Down’s syndrome who learns to drive. The nondisabledworld is suffused with such stories where resilience against all odds is celebrated—a visible and repeated lesson thatdisabled people must overcome disability to be celebrated

Hearing and seeing worlds also dominate our lives. Incontrast, accessible practices and thoughtful infrastructure open up the world for all. As activists powerfullydemonstrate, the problem is not the excluded but the built infrastructures that exclude.

Four concepts in particular—natural, normal, unnatural, and abnormal—form a powerful matrix of inclusion andexclusion. The link between binaries of natural/unnatural and normal/abnormal are resonant frames throughout thisbook. The solution is always about finding ways to “help” and to restore ability of some kind, thus reinforcing thenormal and the normative as desirable spaces that all must emulate. But who sets the standards?

Medical sciences came to anoint themselves as saviors

undesirable, with profound consequences. Eugenic laws, for example, were instrumentalized across the world tosterilize, institutionalize, and at times even eliminate queer and disabled bodies. The history of eugenics is a grimreminder of the power of science, medicine, and the state, especially when all align

The fieldof disability studies chronicles how science and medicine were critical to transforming ideas of biological variation,understood within realms of the moral, spiritual, and metaphysical during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, intomedicalized bodies. Under “the medical model,” disabled and queer bodies were pathologized as lesser, deviant, and

In the course of my work, the fields of queer studies and disability studies emerged as important interlocutors. Bothchallenge binaries: abled/disabled and straight/queer. In challenging the binary classification of bodies as abnormalor deviant, they invite us into rich landscapes and worlds with variety and diversity rather than pathology.

We need to historicize botany and our accountsof plant life in their complex global ecologies of relationality if we are to have any hope of scientific explorationsthat do not merely reinscribe histories of colonial investments. In short, we need to queer botany.

Repeatedly, desirable objects become USAmerican while the undesirable retain their foreign monikers. The majority of US crops are plants of foreignorigin, while most insects that cause damage are considered native

or example, in a naturecultural world, plants are often assigned ethnonationalgroups even as they develop new ecologies in changing networks of botanical and political geographies. In theUnited States, for example, we identify some plants with such names as Japanese knotweed or Chinese privet and yetanoint the Georgia peach as American even though it is of Chinese origin.

Rising beyond the tendencies to conceptualize groups as individual, population, species, genus, variety,class, phylum, or kingdom, rememory foregrounds networks of relationality that emerge from a hypermobile, cross-pollinated, interbreeding world

Rather than critique from without, Ichoose to work from within, to excavate botany’s disciplinary formations and foundations and expand its limited andmyopic sphere of “nature” into new articulations, theories, and concepts that can better account for our embrangledworlds.

For example, how did the tumbleweed, aforeign and indeed invasive plant, become an icon of the American West? Why are some plants reviled and otherscelebrated? Rememorying plant life through naturecultures helps us narrate embrangled lives under and in the wakeof slavery, colonialism, conquest, and servitude, helping us imagine more just futures.

It allows us to unlearn our disciplinarynarratives about natures and cultures and instead commit ourselves to rememorying new genealogies of anaturecultural planet—through fracture and union, through conquest and liberation, through competition andcooperation—to produce a dizzying vista of thoroughly embrangled lives.

If scientific stories narrate the history of life out of Africa inthe language of race, species, populations, or individuals, then rememory opens up our ability to explore the textureof those memories in the flesh, in the sinew, in the pores of the living and the dead—the ghostly afterlives ofMalthus, Darwin, Humboldt, and Linnaeus and new tales of life on earth.

Linnaean “marriage of plants” produced modern reproductive biology and its battle of the sexes.

Rememory can help us recognize theprofound botanical amnesia that produced xenophobic concepts such as invasive species, “discovery” of plants longknown to natives, and translating the exuberance of plant reproduction into the decidedly human registers of “sex.”

What is powerful about the concept of rememory is that it opens up the past, especially the lessons wehave forgotten, unlearned, or never been taught

For Morrison, the past does not remain in the past but emerges as a sitewhere we can make deeper discoveries. In a language “indisputably black,” Morrison opens up spaces for thosehistorically excluded. To Morrison, ghosts do not return; they are “immanent to space.” 

from the fact that we have beenviolated or even that violation continues, but from a condition of inability to locate the heart and soul of theproblem.”

turns the present of narrative#enunciation into the haunting memorial of what has been excluded, excised, evicted.” “Rememory,” as VivianeSaleh-Hanna argues, “is preserved in institutions, branded upon their violently structured bureaucracies andpracticed upon the bodies of the colonized by the bodies of colonizers: a specter is haunting modernity—the specterof colonialism.”

In bringing feminism and botany together, I trace how botany’s colonial roots shape itsfoundational language, terminology, and theories; the field remains grounded in the violence of its colonial pasts.

So much of botanical history remains grounded in internal histories of the west and the biosciences. Lost,forgotten, and erased are the genealogies of women of color feminists, indigenous feminists, and postcolonial,diasporic, crip, queer, and trans feminists, who have always written more syncretic symbiotic stories that do notprivilege the “human.”

While Traditional Ecological Knowledge ( ) is recognized 91as having an equal status with scientific knowledge and being “an intellectual twin to science,” it is consistentlymarginalized by the scientific community

Importantly, coloniality’s infrastructure, grounded on colonial ideas of race andgender, erased other models of social organization and myriad local systems of knowledge the world over. RobinWall Kimmerer frames indigenous ecologies as maintaining good relations in everyday life. She points to anemerging consensus about indigenous knowledge systems as fundamental to conserving biodiversity

Colonialism isn’t an event or a historical blip of actions but an!# BD"C
enduring installation. As Edouard Glissant succinctly observes, “the West is not a place, it is a project.” Understanding colonialism as a project allows us to see its vast infrastructures in academic disciplines. It is thususeful to talk about , the embedded histories of colonialisms that persist. Infrastructures of coloniality!C include not only the epistemologies, methodologies, and methods that structure disciplines but also infrastructures ofsex, gender, race, and sexuality

I hope this book demonstrates the immense power of an interdisciplinaryeducation and why such approaches produce more robust knowledge about the world

For example, as a biologistconfronted with the idea of native and foreign plants, I use my critical thinking skills to interrogate definitions ofand . Are these historical terms? As we will see in the later discussion of invasion biology,!# historicizing botany allows us to recognize these as imprecise, indeed political, categories rather than natural orbiological ones. Is the natural world organized into species? No; these are human constructs. To be sure, suchconceptions can be immensely helpful, but they are also deeply constraining and sometimes misleading. Historiesand contexts matter.

Interdisciplinarity necessitates thinking critically and questioning one’s assumptions

This book’s foundation rests on refusing the binaries of nature and culture, instead embracing Donna Haraway’ssuccinct and interdisciplinary term . Woven through the book you will encounter interdisciplinary!""!"

Feminist science and technology studies ( ) reminds us that there are no sites of purity in the world, no898sites exempt from the hauntings of colonial domination.

Our knowledge production has been far too mediated by the politicsof the academy. The field of botany, like other fields, has “disciplined” itself into a narrow, myopic field, with aprescribed object of study (the plant world) and prescribed methods (the scientific method). Disciplinary educationenables exploring the world from particular perspectives, reproduced generationally—perspectives that are taught,learned, rehearsed, practiced, remembered, and then replicated endlessl

It creates sites of purity such as“wilderness,” and botanical technologies to help “tame” nature.

The wise words of Audre Lorde are a central refrain throughout this book: “It is not our differences whichseparate women, but our reluctance to recognize those differences and to deal effectively with the distortions whichhave resulted from the ignoring and misnaming of those differences.” I expand this wisdom to understand that wedo not need to collapse the diversity of life on earth into a quest for neatness, sameness, parity, or equity. As Lordereminds us, we must celebrate difference by attending to our shared histories

Weneed rich epistemological and methodological landscapes to ground a countercolonial view of biology. We need tointerrogate and challenge linguistic traditions that ground our theories, epistemologies, methodologies, and methodsthat shape botanical practices. Indeed, the clear boundaries between classificatory schemes of life on earth that shapebiology classrooms—animals, plants, fungi, bacteria, viruses, and so on—are more porous than we acknowledge.Likewise, the idea of singular organisms and ecologies has given way to more complex understandings ofassemblages, aggregates, microbiomes, ecosystems, networks, symbionts, holobionts, and so on. I want to createbodies and landscapes without centers and peripheries and without hierarchical ordering.

Colonialism is an ideological, imperial, economic, and cultural project. Thehistory of colonial botany is a story about more than plant worlds—how plants, animals, and colonized humans wereused by and for the colonial project. By centering the plant, we see how colonists remade plants in their image, fortheir needs, consumption, and profit and for empire.

Yet this is not a comprehensive history of the colonial impact on the plant world. Rather, it is aretelling of botany through the histories of colonialism. It is a fascinating story about colonialism in all its variedavatars—ongoing settler colonialism, indigenous, postcolonial, and decolonial thought. I bring these in conversationwith one another through plant worlds.

Years ago, I might have agreed that plants are an odd focus to revisit histories of colonization, but research for thisbook has astonished me. Understanding plant worlds through history reveals how central plants were to colonialismand vice versa.

Why is thisthe center of the narrative of the plant world? Importantly, how might we narrate otherwise? In challenging Linnaeansexual binaries, we challenge all binaries. Surely there are always more than two sides to every issue? Not a singularor binary view but a polyphonic, polybotanical imagination. In revisiting the labyrinth of infinite plant life, I urge usto see botany not as a site of the dark unknown of colonial scripts but as a site of joyful and playful exploration forflourishing botanical futures.Botany of Empire : Plant Worlds and the Scientific Legacies of Colonialism, University of Washington Press, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central,http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/utoronto/detail.action?docID=31362286.Created from utoronto on 2025-11-09 19:08:52.Copyright © 2024. University of Washington Press. All rights reserved. Ebook pages 14-36 | Printed page 2 of 11

Linnaeus attempted to resolve the labyrinth of biologicaldiversity by organizing it into a simple system of nomenclature and classification. But in this system, the complexityof biological life and the richness of its worlds, especially the indigenous cultural contexts, were lost. Linnaeus builta thread that rendered biological life as a model of human gender, race, and sexuality as saw it.

Linnaeus’s thread that showed the way out of the labyrinth of colonialC !
!"botany continues to tether modern botany to colonial ideologies and sciences. Contemporary plant worlds, theirnames, and theories of histories, geographies, ecologies, and evolutions remain bound to the powerful hand ofLinnaeus

When Linnaeus began his career, “natural history was amess, and people needed guidelines.” Drawing on the Greek myth where Ariadne fell in love with Theseus andgave him a ball of string to help him find his way out of the Minotaur’s labyrinth, Jean Jacques Rousseau, an ardentbotanist, praised Linnaeus’s work as Ariadne’s thread, allowing botany to find its way out of a dark labyrinth ofcolonial excess

Its imaginationand structures were fueled by powerful ideas about colonialism, race, gender, sexuality, and nation. The lastinglegacy of this history is that all modern scientists are de facto Linnaeans.

When Linnaeus began his career, “natural history was amess, and people needed guidelines.” Drawing on the Greek myth where Ariadne fell in love with Theseus andgave him a ball of string to help him find his way out of the Minotaur’s labyrinth, Jean Jacques Rousseau, an ardentbotanist, praised Linnaeus’s work as Ariadne’s thread, allowing botany to find its way out of a dark labyrinth ofcolonial excess

The rise of botany transposed colonial views onto nature. No surprise,then, that there is more scientific work on competition than on cooperation, more on conflict than on coexistence,more on battle between the sexes than on joyful cooperative living. Colonial worldviews ground branches ofbiology—both botany and zoology

By the mid-nineteenth century, theprofession of botany was thoroughly a masculine enterprise and the ascendant male botanist its celebrated prototype.Likewise, we see the erasure of artisanal and working-class botanists. As in other fields, women, once present inlarge numbers, were systematically excluded as the field emerged as a “science” and a male enclave.One of the key insights of feminist work on the sciences is that even though nature is consistently genderedfeminine (for example, “mother nature”), biology has persistently shaped the workings of nature as masculine andpatriarchal—nature red in tooth and claw.

Ann Shteir documents powerfully that as botanymarched toward becoming “modernized” and “scientific,” the field embraced strategies to defeminize botany. Shewrites, “through textual practices and other means, women and gender-tagged activities were placed into a botanicalseparate sphere, set apart from the mainstream of the budding science.

____________

Prosocial: Technology should enable connection and coordination, helping us become better neighbors, collaborators, and stewards of shared spaces, both online and off.

hyper-scale,

This is where AI provides a missing puzzle piece. Software can now respond fluidly to the context and particularity of each human—at scale. One-size-fits-all is no longer a technological or economic necessity. Where once our digital environments inevitably shaped us against our will, we can now build technology that adaptively shapes itself in service of our individual and collective aspirations. We can build resonant environments that bring out the best in every human who inhabits them.

Lepzi™ POC-PlGF will be unblinded to inform referral and delivery for suspected preeclampsia.

to persuade

email interfaces change our word choices.

taking notes longhand leads to greater recall

We have to remember that although AI machines work on sophisticated statistics, advanced mathematics

leveraging

conducive

Lepzi™ POC-PlGF will be unblinded to inform referral and delivery for suspected preeclampsia.

DNA is sequenced to depths targeted to maximize diversity capture using a combination of Oxford Nanopore and Illumina for long and short reads, respectively, allowing for the generation of high quality and high contiguity genomic assemblies.

the Basecamp Research supply chain allows royalty disbursements to be triggered at the point of data use and not only at the point of final product commercialisation

concern

timeliness